July 1, 2007 – Rabbi Andew Baker, AJC’s director of International Jewish Affairs, is featured in a Wall Street Journal article on Egyptian Jewry.

“Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee has traveled to Egypt twice in the past year and a half to launch an effort to salvage and repair the synagogues and cemeteries and holy objects. He longs to build a Jewish museum that would preserve the Egypt Jewry's fabled history,” writes Lucette Lagnado in an extensive Page One article based on her newly published book, The Man in the White Sharkskin Sun.

In the book Journal reporter Lagnado recounts the rich history of a vibrant Jewish community in Egypt, how she, as a young child, fled in 1963 with her family after Nasser came to power, and how Cairo has changed since that time. In preparing the lengthy article that appeared in the June 30 edition of the Journal, Lagnado interviewed Rabbi Baker extensively.

“Rabbi Baker brings a unique vantage point to his mission. He has spent the past 17 years, since the fall of communism is the early 1990s, crisscrossing Russia and Eastern Europe rescuing Jewish properties from Torah scrolls to synagogues that were abandoned during the Holocaust,” writes Lagnado.

"If you visited the cities of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s -- Warsaw, Lodz, Vilnius, Bratislava, Prague -- there were only faint reminders of their storied Jewish past," says Rabbi Baker in the Journal. "One might see faded Yiddish inscriptions on some building, or a soot-covered Star of David. In Egypt, I felt similar echoes of that experience.”

Lagnado writes that Baker “is hopeful that Cairo -- hungry for tourist dollars -- may be motivated to fix up Jewish sites if only to attract visitors. But in his recent trips he encountered wariness. One morning, Rabbi Baker woke up to find an article in an independent Arabic newspaper disparaging his entire mission.

The full Wall Street Journal article, “Searching for My Father’s Lost City,” is available at www.wsj.com.